Reuters: “Microsoft could lose as much as $1 billion on its new Xbox video game console before breaking even in fiscal 2004, an influential Wall Street analyst said Monday.

Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker said the console faced competition in the short term but had long-term opportunity.

“We believe that Xbox could lose around ($1 billion)…before breaking even in (fiscal 2004) if the product is reasonably successful,” she said in a note to clients.”

The Register: “Apple was victorious against Microsoft last week, after CNET ran a Windows XP versus Mac OS X death match, and eventually awarded Mac the trophy.

The punch-up was actually a dead heat but Apple won when the judges ruled its upgrade/licensing deal gave it the edge. However, Apple’s victory was shortlived, as a quick rethink saw the battle royal reduced to a draw – apparently the Mac OS X upgrade/licensing path is only better value than WinXP’s if you pirate the software.”

“Sun Microsystems announced plans Monday to make its new Java Virtual Machine for Microsoft’s Windows XP available as a free download.

The new Java Virtual Machine (JVM) allows Java applications–from games to collaboration software–to run on Windows XP.

Sun says the new JVM will also offer new multimedia and animation support as well as enhanced performance, among other things.” Full story at CNET News.com.

Reported at BBC News: “The Italian-owned music website Vitaminic has licensed part of its enormous digital music catalogue to US-based file swapping service Napster.
The deal will give Napster users access to 250,000 Vitaminic digital tracks as part of a planned membership-based file-sharing service.”

Augustus writes “LinuxHardware.orgtakes a look at what can be had in the now budget SMP market of the Intel Pentium 3. A lot of Linux users would love to go SMP but the hardware required is somewhat cost prohibitive when you look at the latest and greatest. In this review, LH.o looks at two different Pentium 3 SMP chipsets with Dual Pentium 3 933s, and 512MB SDRAM. The results of one of the tests may surprise you.”

Posted by Alan Cox, at Advogato: “Linus will be releasing a 2.4.14 and probably a 2.4.15 finishing off the VM stability work and other rough corners. At that point the 2.5 kernel tree will be opened. There is a lot stuff queued for 2.5. It isn’t going to be possible or sensible to throw it all into 2.5.0. One of the tasks is to put changes together in the right order.

Marcelo Tosatti will be the head maintainer over the 2.4 stable kernel tree. This is not the giant change it may seem from the outside.”

Anonymous Reader writes “This article at LinuxDevices.com takes a look at Sharp’s Linux+Java partnership in support of its new Zaurus PDA, and highlights the strategy as a “third way” — an alternative to PalmOS and WindowsCE (PocketPC). The story provides extensive references including links to related news announcements from five companies (Sharp, Lineo, Insignia Solutions, Trolltech, and Opera) as well as numerous articles with detailed background information on Sharp’s new Linux-based Zaurus PDA.”

So what U.S. wireless providers are saying is that they can give you fixed broadband or 3G, but not both. That’s not the main focus of this PC World article, which explains why AT&T Wireless decided to take a $1.3 billion write down to end its fixed broadband service. Perhaps it’s just a coincidence that the same frequencies used for that service are also used for 3G wireless communications?

From Debian.org: “The fourth revision of Debian GNU/Linux 2.2 (codename `potato’) has been released. This point release, revision 2.2r4, mostly includes security updates, along with a few corrections of serious bugs in the stable distribution.

Upgrading to this revision online is usually done by pointing the `apt’ package tool (see the sources.list(5) manual page) to one of Debian’s many FTP or HTTP mirrors. A comprehensive list is available at:

http://www.debian.org/distrib/ftplist

Posted at PR Newswire: “VMware, Inc., the global leader
in virtualization software for Intel computers, today announced general
availability of VMware(TM) Workstation 3.0, the latest generation of its
award-winning desktop software for technical professionals. Workstation
3.0 delivers significant usability and performance enhancements over previous
releases, dramatically expanding the utility and value of virtual computing
across the entire enterprise.”